Little real work is getting done this afternoon. But I did re-arrange my desk and now have the Mac laptop front and center. I've seen this stacked laptop / monitor setup used before and it seems to work pretty well.
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Look look what Santa is bring me for Christmas! I now have to walk less then a block for my tea fix!
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Started with TKD practice and cupcakes for Rosie's b-day. Then we had lunch and I got some yard work done. The pile of needles that wouldn't fit a couple weeks ago in the yard waste bin is now in there.
I also got around to switching out the crappy ADI 220 radio in the FJ. The stupid thing would reset if you looked at it weird, way to sensitive to any voltage fluctuation. I replaced it with a old TM-231 I picked up a long time ago. I'm hoping it will play nice and allow me to chat with the WetNet group now when commuting. I was very lucky and same mounting bracket fit both radios….
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Finished TKD – I brought cupcakes for everybody since it was @rosiesgrosso b-day!
WOW! The moon is so bright! Amazing it is clear in Seattle this evening and I couldn't sleep, so I took Isaac's telescope out. Amazing view of the moon, I hope it stays clear until the eclipse this morning. Isaac asked to be woke up, so he could watch it.
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Look out, the FOG is coming!!
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Little boy looking for the train…. http://t.co/yH0xE9Mp
I basically had the home-brew D-Star repeater built, just little clean up things left and then it can be moved off the bench to the machine room. One of the little clean up things left was making a the cable harness to go from the dv-node adaptor board mounted inside the PC to the back of the PC case. Then make a second cable to go from the back of the PC case to the repeater itself. Sounds simple, right?
Well it took basically all week to get these two cables made. First problem was coming up with how to mount the bulkhead 6pin mini-DIN. After digging through the junk box I found a old video hard with bracket that almost had the right size hole. After drilling and lots of filing, I managed to make the bulk head connector fit. From there I wired up the DB-9, which connects to the dv-node adaptor.
The remaining cable was nasty one. I basically re-used the wired molex connector that was already wired to a piece of CAT6. I just cleaned things up a little bit, adding some shrink tubing. This took about 10 minutes. But then I had to attach a male mini-DIN, which I now remember why I hate.
I burned through two of them, before finally getting one cleanly wired up. Just a little to much heat and the plastic will melt which holds the whole thing together. I started out with one connector, so there was a whole day wasted until I could get to Fry’s and buy some more. But finally this evening I finished it up, made sure all the wires were connected end to end correctly and re-connected the dv-node adaptor and repeater.
Everything worked perfectly and W7RNK-B is now back on the air. I even spent the 10 minutes to crank the output power back up, so it is now putting a full 10watts out to a dummy load. Tomorrow I’ll start moving things to the machine room (i.e. the laundry room) and hook it up to the real antenna.
Very happy!!!
I basically had the home-brew D-Star repeater built, just little clean up things left and then it can be moved off the bench to the machine room. One of the little clean up things left was making a the cable harness to go from the dv-node adaptor board mounted inside the PC to the back of the PC case. Then make a second cable to go from the back of the PC case to the repeater itself. Sounds simple, right?
Well it took basically all week to get these two cables made. First problem was coming up with how to mount the bulkhead 6pin mini-DIN. After digging through the junk box I found a old video hard with bracket that almost had the right size hole. After drilling and lots of filing, I managed to make the bulk head connector fit. From there I wired up the DB-9, which connects to the dv-node adaptor.
The remaining cable was nasty one. I basically re-used the wired molex connector that was already wired to a piece of CAT6. I just cleaned things up a little bit, adding some shrink tubing. This took about 10 minutes. But then I had to attach a male mini-DIN, which I now remember why I hate.
I burned through two of them, before finally getting one cleanly wired up. Just a little to much heat and the plastic will melt which holds the whole thing together. I started out with one connector, so there was a whole day wasted until I could get to Fry's and buy some more. But finally this evening I finished it up, made sure all the wires were connected end to end correctly and re-connected the dv-node adaptor and repeater.
Everything worked perfectly and W7RNK-B is now back on the air. I even spent the 10 minutes to crank the output power back up, so it is now putting a full 10watts out to a dummy load. Tomorrow I'll start moving things to the machine room (i.e. the laundry room) and hook it up to the real antenna.
Very happy!!!
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Final Google Plus repost…. (for now)
Spent 20 minutes tonight after putting Isaac to bed moving around the cable modem. It is now living in the ‘datacenter’ or what is otherwise known as the laundry room. Rosie was off learning how to-do something crazy in the snow this winter at REI, so it was a prefect time to take a 20 minute outage at the Richards house. We take our Internet connectivity very seriously. The good news is that everything just came back up and the signal to the headend unit is actually better now. (Which makes sense, about 40 feet less coax is involved)
That left just enough time to design the inter-connects for the dv-node adaptor. Now that the dv-node adaptor is inside the repeater PC case, I need to run the connection out to a 6pin DIN header and then make a 6pin DIN to weird molex connector cable. (Thanks to Jeremy for the 6pin bulk head connectors) I’ve found that actually writing down how it is all going together, including a wire color chart, before making the cable saves lots of head aches. Plus, I then have a record to refer to later if something breaks.
